National Sports

Brewers up 3-0 on Dodgers with win in LA

LOS ANGELES -- The Milwaukee Brewers hit the second-fewest home runs in baseball during the regular season, even as they topped the majors with 103 wins.

Maybe they were saving their biggest swings for the Los Angeles Dodgers.

Jake Bauers and Garrett Mitchell launched back-to-back homers off Blake Snell in the seventh inning, and the Brewers beat the Dodgers 6-2 on Wednesday to build a 3-0 cushion in the National League Championship Series.

Jackson Chourio also went deep on the first pitch of the game to help the Brewers close within one win of their first NL pennant. Milwaukee was in the American League when the franchise reached its only World Series, a seven-game loss to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1982.

“Job’s not finished yet,” Mitchell said.

Game 4 was Thursday night at Dodger Stadium, where the Brewers could become the first major league club to complete a postseason sweep after getting swept by that same opponent in the previous postseason.

Los Angeles took all four games against Milwaukee in the NLCS last year.

On Wednesday, the Dodgers had just gone ahead 2-1 in the sixth inning before getting stunned by the Brewers in their three-run seventh. The loss pushed the two-time defending World Series champions to the brink of elimination.

“All three games we’ve played so far, and hopefully that continues, where just every time they score, we come back and score,” Milwaukee manager Pat Murphy said. “That’s not easy to do in baseball.”

It was the fifth comeback victory in seven postseason games for the Brewers, who have never beaten Los Angeles in three previous playoff series.

The only other time the Dodgers trailed 3-0 in a best-of-seven postseason series, they were swept by the Baltimore Orioles in the 1966 World Series.

The lone team in big league history to come back from a 3-0 deficit to win a best-of-seven postseason series was the Boston Red Sox in the 2004 AL Championship Series against the New York Yankees.

“We’ve won four in a row a number of times this year,” Dodgers manager Dave Roberts said. “We’ve got to win tomorrow. That’s our only focus.”

Coming into the seventh, Snell had retired 14 batters in a row. But the first pitch of the game thrown by the two-time Cy Young Award winner was hit for a home run by Chourio, and his last pitch was Mitchell’s solo shot.

Andrew Vaughn drew a seven-pitch walk to open the seventh and was replaced by pinch-runner Christian Yelich. Bauers followed with a 412-foot drive to right field on the 11th pitch of his at-bat for a 3-2 lead as most of the players in Milwaukee’s dugout came onto the field to celebrate.

“I was looking for a fastball, and I didn’t want to miss it,” said Bauers, who had a team-leading 26 of Milwaukee’s 154 regular-season homers.

It was his latest relentless plate appearance, too, after Bauers drew a 12-pitch walk from Yoshinobu Yamamoto that helped the Brewers go ahead early in Game 2.